Apple just can't help but shoot themselves in the foot. They hit a sweet spot with the iPod, but their recent misstep with the latest generation has left little doubt that they iPod will soon go the way of the Macintosh computer and go from a market leader to a niche item.
Well, last time I checked sales of Macintosh computers have increased faster than sales of other computers year-over-year, so they might become less and less of a niche market as time progresses. Also, it's not always a bad thing to be in a niche market, as long as the niche is big enough and margins are good.
In taking out the phone and releasing the iPod touch, though, Apple made another huge blunder. Instead of adding a real hard drive, Apple used the same flash memory they do in the iPhone, limiting the device to 16GB. For many longtime iPod users, this is nowhere near enough storage.
For those people they still have the iPod classic. The form factor of the touch -flat, with the touchscreen coverering the full front face- just does not lend itself very well for a microdrive. Also, for me 16GB is *more* than enough, because I use my iPod (a 4GB nano) as a portable player, not as a storage device for my complete music library. A 200GB MP3 player would end up in a mess in my hands, because I'm too lazy to actually synchronize all the songs with my PC, make proper playlists, etc. Instead I now just pick a few albums I like to hear that day, pad the rest of the space with a random playlist and erase the whole thing when I've had enough of the music on it. I don't need more than 16GB's of storage for that.
Apple's solution has been to simultaneously release the iPod Classic, which has more than ample storage, but is lacking in all the exciting new features that Apple has been devoting their R&D to. These users will feel left out, and be more suceptable to switching to a competitors player that offers more features when it comes time for another purchase.
The competitors don't have all the new features *and* the form factor *and* the storage either, so as of yet it's still choosing between storage/factor/features. I think it's actually a good thing Apple widened their iPod line to suit different usage patterns. Users won't 'feel left out' at all, it works the other way around: more people will find an iPod that suits their personal uses for an MP3 player. The way you put it product differentation would be a bad thing by definition, because it's always unfair to the people who buy a product that does not have all the same features as its siblings.
Then, of coarse, there is the new iPod Nano Video, with its tiny screen. This isn't Tokyo, impractically small electronics have never taken off in America, and the new Nano will be no exception.
Agreed. The video capabilities of the Nano are a gimmick, and no-one in their right mind will probably make real use of them. That said, personally I kind of like the new form factor. But I would've been just as happy if they just upped the RAM a little to 8GB and kept the design like it was, because there wasn't really anything wrong with the Nano in the first place.
This new development is just another nail in the coffin on the new iPod line. If I still had Apple stock, I would sell it now.
Neither the stock market nor the market for consumer electronics seem to agree with your views, so maybe you should re-consider them. Apple has been one of the most successful brands of the past few years, and that is not going to change anytime soon, especially not because of the introduction of the new iPods. They don't take any choice away from consumers (ok, except connecting with Linux) but they do offer a few interesting new features (most notably WiFi and touchscreen), so I think the future is pretty bright for the iPod.
Apple's insistence on dictating behavior on their users has crossed the line from insult to injury. Congratulations, Steve, you just lost a customer.
Let me guess, when I google I find hacks using nspluginviewer?
Yes. That, or you could install a 32-bit FF, it's not like it makes a lot of difference in speed or whatever... But nspluginwrapper works pretty well for an ugly hack.
They could probably make better use of the die space of the 4th, 3rd, or even 2nd CPU core by putting things like cache there instead.
The benefits of having extra cache drop off very quickly above certain cache sizes (depending on the addressable RAM the cache is indexing). A lot more is involved with improving level-0/1/2 cache performance than just upping the cache size.
I'd expect greater benefits from moving dedicated (but programmable) VLIW units into the CPU to increase instruction-level parallelism, for example for efficient video encoding/decoding, image and audio processing etc. You could create a very versatile CPU that doesn't need a big GPU or dedicated audio hardware, and still be very usable for both workstation as well as multimedia/video editing tasks.
Exactly. As a matter of fact I work for a company (not mentioning which, my boss wouldn't appreciate it) that develops software to migrate chips to smaller technologies, detects/fixes design-rule violations, detects/fixes litho hotspots, that kind of stuff. It is used by many well-known names in the IC industry. We've been in business for more than 10 years already, so this hardly sounds as something new.
I wonder how much of the 'energy saved' will be consumed by all those machines they use in the hospital for people who get eye problems from staring at white/grey on black text.
Also, You'd think changing your desktop background to solid black would make more of a difference then just changing google. I spent at most 10 minutes a day with the Google page open. And it's not that there's no other site that uses a white background. How much energy do flashing ads consume btw?
I agree. We must protect the fundamental human right to download music!
The scope of this ruling goes beyond only downloading music, it sets a precedent for other cases where 3rd parties request information on your browsing habits.
Sure, until you get a 1080p a year or two down the road. Just seems kinda shortsighted not to spend the extra $100 and to get a player that is going to support you for much longer.
Well, seeing that I only have it for like 6 months I don't think I'll be replacing it anytime soon. Especially because I sit close enough to my TV to not need (or want) a >=40" screen (my TV is 'only' 32"). For $99 I don't mind to replace it within a few years anyway.
As for the guy who commented that it's not really worth it to hook up a HD-DVD player to a 720p TV: I don't really believe that. If I watch closely I can see the macroblocking and color banding on some DVD movies. My current DVD player is not bad but definitely not great, and it doesn't do upscaling or anything like that. It would surprise me if I wouldn't be able to clearly see the difference with an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movie.
So if you just have a 720p TV (like I do) and don't care about 'HDMI 1.3' (whatever benefit you might get from that) or gold-plated connectors (for *digital* signals??), it's actually at least a half-decent player?
While there are definitely areas in which Java really sucks (specifically: UI programming) I think the 'Java lacks the speed of C' argument is getting really, *really* old. Granted, I would not choose Java for my next-generation DX10 graphics engine, because even in C++ it would *need* to stress top-end hardware to the maximum. But properly written Java code can be almost as efficient as C++ code, and in some cases even faster. A hardware accelerated 3D pipeline would actually fit Java pretty well, and could be plenty fast. Orders of magnitude faster than what's needed to introduce people to 3D programming.
You check some of the advanced XNA applications on the 360. These are coded in C#, which is pretty much comparable to Java in terms of performance (the C# VM is apperently pretty good, so it's probably a little faster). The example applications include a very good looking 'racing game' (XNA racer) which uses complex 3D models and textures and runs at a full 60fps, and it's not even using all three CPU cores of the 360.
Interpreted languages are not much slower than statically compiled languages todat...
Qt is slow as molasses. We just failed the speed requirement for an uni project because Qt will easily eat 100% CPU if you have to log data into a table a few times a second (of course that's the reason we don't care
Well, maybe you just need to learn how to code write efficient Qt code then... Qt is not the fastest UI library on earth, but it is *not* 'slow as molasses'. We use it on hardware ranging from Pentium-II@500Mhz, to UltraSparcII@400Mhz to dual Opterons, and even on the lowest-end hardware it works fine.
Why, by the way, would you want to log data into a Qt table a few times a second? Do you seriously expect people to 'read the table' *a few times a second*. Don't you think data aggregation and lazy posting to the table would be a better idea for *any* GUI toolkit. You just sound like blame your own incompetence in GUI programming on Qt.
Then there's the whole issue of saccades, which is why for example newspapers do not run sentences horizontally across the entire page, but rather split the page up into columns. Your eye gets confused when the line gets too long - it's easier to read when there are fewer words on the screen.
IMHO, that's not a valid comparison. Newspapers contain dense texts in which each row is fully occupied. Most programming languages contain maybe 60% whitespace and only 40% characters. Also, when 'reading' code to find what I'm looking for, I look more to indentation to deduce the structure of the code than to the text itself.
Imagine code like this:
if (a)
{...
if (b)
{...
while (c)
{...
if (leftInstance && rightInstance && !leftInstance->isEqual(rightInstance))
{
if (d)
leftInstance->assignAttribute(rightInstance->getAt tribute());
}
}
}
}
Would this code *really* be 'more readable' (in terms of how much effort you brains need to decipher its structure) if it where written like this?:
if (a)
{...
if (b)
{...
while (c)
{...
if (leftInstance && rightInstance &&
!leftInstance->isEqual(rightInstance))
{
if (d)
leftInstance->assignAttribute(
rightInstance->getAttribute())
}
}
}
}
It's very nice and refreshing to wake up on a saterday morning, read Slashdot, and find out American politicians with a sane view on reality actually still exist. Completely independent of the fact if you like and/or approve of online gambling, softdrugs, alcohol, etc. this is the only way to reduce their harmful effects to a minimum, regulate them, and still respect the choices made by individuals.
I don't know much about Ben Frank's other political views, but he definitely seems more pragmatic (as opposed to dogmatic) than most high-profile US politicians I know of. I think that's a good thing. Where I come from (the Netherlands), the attitude against for example softdrugs, smart drugs, alcohol and other possibly harmful things people can do to themselves is comparable, and from 27 years of experience I can tell this has lead to lower softdrugs usage than in the countries surrounding us, less health issues, less drugs-related crimes etc.
Funny thing is, the Dutch government still has a really stupid and dualistic stance on (online) gambling. Online gambling is specifically prohibited here, as is organising (for example) small-scale poker tournaments etc. The *only* institution that is allowed to offer legal gambling opportunities is 'Holland Casino', which is a government-controlled (but still commercially exploited) casino that has a monopoly on all things related to gambling. This includes, for example, all variants of poker, even though the most popular variants don't even qualify as gambling. Now, over the last few years, playing poker has become a real hype here. Lots of people play it now, and they want to play tournaments against different opponents. What's happening right now, is that small-scale 'illegal' poker tournaments (with buy-ins in the $10-$50 range, or $0.5-$2 cash games) get busted every now and then, and the people entering and organising them are criminalised. This has lead to more people finding their ways to 'Holland Casino' for playing poker, which only offers tournaments starting at $100 buy-ins, or $5-$10 cash games. Just yesterday a study was published that showed a lot of dutch students have gambling debts from playing poker on limits that are way too high for their skills...
What happens when the hypothesis cannot be proved wrong? Not because the tests validate it but because there is no such way to test it for accuracy? And there are some of those being thrown out as fact today.
What happens then, is that people start calling their beliefs 'faith', and eventually these beliefs might even become 'religion'. It's exactly how we ended up with several (all considered equally 'valid' by different groups of people) of "God's word", and the non-falsifiable existence (or non-existence) of God.
In science, no theory or hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Strange enough religion-zealots actually turn this argument around when it comes to their faith, completely blinded of the irony in it.
I was not talking about Boost, that's a completely different subject (on which I mostly disagree with you as well but lets forget about that). I've read most of your replies in this topic, and that's what I'm basing my judgement on. You cannot seriously believe that things like operator overloading, design patterns, RAII, Boost, templates and the other things you see no purpose for are all 'flavour of the month paradigms' and only useful for programmers to show off. If you do, you are not an experienced developer to me, at least not one that moved along with advancements in the field. But maybe you're just trolling by blowing your arguments completely out of proportion.
If you really consider yourself a skilled C++ programmer you'd acknowledge that C++ provides 1001 ways to do the same thing. For some purposes using operator overloading and templates is better, for other purposes using method overloading and OO inheritance is better. Same goes for other problems C++ offers multiple solutions for. Sometimes multiple inheritance is ok, sometimes it is terrible. Heck, sometimes using 'goto' even makes sense. If you're not only consider yourself a skilled C++ programmer but also a skilled software engineer, you'd also acknowledge that code re-use and design patterns are almost always good things if applied properly, irrespective of the implementation language. If you say 'design patterns' is just new and cool terminology for clueless programmers you probably never even opened the de-facto standard work about design patterns (Gamma et. al) and browsed it a little. It's just common solutions to recurring problems, that can save you a lot of work because you don't have to re-invent them yourself. It's just design re-use on the architectural level, which is even more important than re-use on the implementation level.
I think you should try coding up some Java, C#, D or Python some day. You'll probably be disgusted by all the 'paradigms of the month' they applied to those languages, how much re-use and design patterns are incorporated into them etc. You think it's just because the people who created the languages wanted to show off?
No , something like vectorAdd(v1,v2) would be a lot more readable and a damn site easier to grep for. Idiot.
Calling people an idiot does not contribute to making your point. While there actually are some valid points why operator overloading is not always (maybe even most of the times) a good idea, there are also lots of cases where it *is*. You're taking your argument way out of context, which gives me the impression you're not a professional and/or experienced C++ coder (yet?). There is no silver bullet especially not in C++, seeing in how many domains it can be used. Depending on what you're writing, sometimes abstraction from the implementation and improving readability of the logic the code is implementing is much more important than improving traceability of operators etc. Imagine writing a library that has classes to represent polynomials, with methods to add, multiply, evaluate, simplify, etc. polynomials, or individual terms of them. I don't even want to know what even moderately complex code would end up like, if every operation on every different type of polynomial term has its own distinctive member function, instead of the operators also used in real mathematics. Now try asking a mathematician to debug the mathematics (ie: not the code itself) of an application you wrote using this library...
[i]A few years ago I also tried out Insure++ from Parasoft, which seemed to be of similar, if not slightly better, quality.[/i]
We 'use' Insure++ as well, but unfortunately 'using it' is limited to tracking down arcane, semi-valid C++ constructs in our code that Insure++ b0rks on. Insure++ supposed to be a pretty advanced tool, but it is not actively maintained anymore and it's full of limitations that make it almost unusable for existing codebases. Especially stuff with templates, stuff using classes from external namespaces and dodgy C++ constructs that compile without warnings on every compiler I know will make Insure++ instrumentation fail. Also, linking the instrumented source files together fails on 1 out of every 10 object files, especially if they also link against third-party static libs (.a on linux). Sometimes you can fix this, but most of the time it is completely unclear why the thing fails. This effectively rendere the whole tool useless as you cannot be sure there will be no problems left in the non-instrumented parts of your codebase. And in those cases instrumentation *does* work, the output you'll get when running the instrumented binaries is sometimes really unclear, confusing or downright nonsense.
Last but not least, Parasoft support is awful. We've been told some of our linkage problems, for which we filed bug reports, would be fixed in a later release. No new version was released for 1.5 years, and on multiple inquiries about this we did not even get a reply. Then, all of a sudden Parasoft released a new version a while ago, which we found out about 4 months later as they did not bother to notify us about it...
If what you call 'personal freedom' is so aptly represented by the right to bear firearms, I'd say you have a really strange idea of 'freedom'. IMO the most important representatives of personal freedom are freedom of speech, freedom of thought, political preferences, sexual preferences, the right to decide what you do with your own property, the right to proper health care and education, even for the less wealthy, etc. etc. etc. Guns of all things *don't even occur to me* when thinking of personal freedom...
Still, the USA are famous for their bad public health care for large groups of people, their hypocritcal views on sexuality and different sexual preferences, strong commercial lobbies that dictate politics instead of common sense, government censorship, irrational soft drugs (why is smoking a joint not'personal freedom') and alcohol policy and so on. Yet the *one* thing that virtually no 'free people' from other parts of the world (the right to have guns) care about, seems to be the only fucking thing that matters when it comes down to 'freedom'.
Clearly, the "problem" is that we, the Linux community, should be trying to "convert" the n00bs out there who don't know what apt-get is. Having WINE preinstalled would help them get over the fact that they're not running Windows, yet everything is fine, and they can do pretty much everything today they that they could when they were running Windows yesterday.
If you ever tried running anything half-decent with Wine, you would know that it is not exactly a 'n00b-friendly' piece of software anyway. If you even get your application to work at all, it will likely crash frequently, miss features, show display errors, save stuff in crazy locations, look horrible because of font issues etc. etc. Removing Wine does not really make the OS less attrictive for new users, if you ask me. If you wanted to make it more convenient for new Linux users to run Windows apps, including a desktop link to www.parallels.com would probably have better value than including Wine.
To the GP, I would suggest that you haven't had a large corporation to support. We support a nation wide network (ok, so it's australia, we're still a nation!) with only 13 support staff including our in-house development team.
I don't work in IT support, so you're right about me not having had to support a nation-wide network. I did, however, work as an IT Engineer for a very large multinational (Philips). Although this might not be true for all Philips' divisions or countries, the IT and network over there was maintained completely different from the way you do it. No-one has administrator right, no-one can do even as much as change the display resolution, install custom crap that goes outside the user folders etc. People *could* install software themselves, but only through an automated & fenced-off application that let you pick the tool you needed and then installed it without any user interaction. The actual version, install location (local or network), default settings etc. etc. were all set by IT support.
This approach worked very well. In the time I worked there I never had any problems with my system or the software on it, and none of my colleages ever really had. The systems where all clean and uniform, which IMHO is the way to go. Customizing your workstation is something you should do at home...
Actually its a very effective method for both the IT team and the people who desperately need the administrative access. IT aren't required to understand every little john doe program that these people can want to install so they don't have to support them (this is very clearly communicated to these users).
[..]
An example of a good operator: there's a bloke over in administration who I would swear used to work in IT. He's got Open Office installed when everyone else uses Microsoft Office, he uses firefox, thunderbird and trillian for his messenger. About 500 theme packs and a few other bits of software. According to our helpdesk logging system he has only ever called once, and this was when he patched himself for the new daylight savings time last year. Everyone else had the problem as well.
I'd say that's a pretty stupid way to 'administer' your workstations... Why can these people even install all this shit themselves? How can some bloke in administration 'patch his machine' himself? And how does making them not call support because they know they won't fix your problem help with the maintenance of your network. The only thing I can see something like that heading to is an IT support department that only answers the utterly stupid requests and hardware failures. Employees just don't bother to call them because they don't want there machine re-imaged, so they just start fooling around themselves, or ask some guy like the 'bloke from administration' to 'fix' their system. Eventually that can only and in a maintenance and security nightmare.
If they really add DivX & xvid codecs that'd be very nice indeed. I'll most probably make some use of this if it allows playback from a USB drive, at least for now as I don't have a better alternative. *But*: as a media center/media center extender I think the 360 is pretty much dead in the water, because it has 2 major disadvantages that the first generation Apple TV (with all its own annoying limitations) doesn't have: it makes too much noise for a media player, and it doesn't have wireless built-in by default.
Sure, you can get used to the fan noise, just ignore it, or just turn up the volume to masquerade it. But that doesn't cut it for me. As much as I like my modded Xbox classic with XBMC, I rarely use it for watching movies for the same reason. It kind of kills the atmosphere in quiet scenes, and IMHO a media player just should be silent, period. As for the wireless: you can buy the add-on but I refuse to pay 100 euros for something that should not cost more than 30, and should be in by default.
So I guess I'll just keep looking around for some other affordable HTPC-like solution that can do all this silently. Maybe when the Apple TV is fully hacked to run Linux with full HW support and the XBMC porting efforts yield something I will pick up one of these.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple just can't help but shoot themselves in the foot. They hit a sweet spot with the iPod, but their recent misstep with the latest generation has left little doubt that they iPod will soon go the way of the Macintosh computer and go from a market leader to a niche item.
Well, last time I checked sales of Macintosh computers have increased faster than sales of other computers year-over-year, so they might become less and less of a niche market as time progresses. Also, it's not always a bad thing to be in a niche market, as long as the niche is big enough and margins are good.
In taking out the phone and releasing the iPod touch, though, Apple made another huge blunder. Instead of adding a real hard drive, Apple used the same flash memory they do in the iPhone, limiting the device to 16GB. For many longtime iPod users, this is nowhere near enough storage.
For those people they still have the iPod classic. The form factor of the touch -flat, with the touchscreen coverering the full front face- just does not lend itself very well for a microdrive. Also, for me 16GB is *more* than enough, because I use my iPod (a 4GB nano) as a portable player, not as a storage device for my complete music library. A 200GB MP3 player would end up in a mess in my hands, because I'm too lazy to actually synchronize all the songs with my PC, make proper playlists, etc. Instead I now just pick a few albums I like to hear that day, pad the rest of the space with a random playlist and erase the whole thing when I've had enough of the music on it. I don't need more than 16GB's of storage for that.
Apple's solution has been to simultaneously release the iPod Classic, which has more than ample storage, but is lacking in all the exciting new features that Apple has been devoting their R&D to. These users will feel left out, and be more suceptable to switching to a competitors player that offers more features when it comes time for another purchase.
The competitors don't have all the new features *and* the form factor *and* the storage either, so as of yet it's still choosing between storage/factor/features. I think it's actually a good thing Apple widened their iPod line to suit different usage patterns. Users won't 'feel left out' at all, it works the other way around: more people will find an iPod that suits their personal uses for an MP3 player. The way you put it product differentation would be a bad thing by definition, because it's always unfair to the people who buy a product that does not have all the same features as its siblings.
Then, of coarse, there is the new iPod Nano Video, with its tiny screen. This isn't Tokyo, impractically small electronics have never taken off in America, and the new Nano will be no exception.
Agreed. The video capabilities of the Nano are a gimmick, and no-one in their right mind will probably make real use of them. That said, personally I kind of like the new form factor. But I would've been just as happy if they just upped the RAM a little to 8GB and kept the design like it was, because there wasn't really anything wrong with the Nano in the first place.
This new development is just another nail in the coffin on the new iPod line. If I still had Apple stock, I would sell it now.
Neither the stock market nor the market for consumer electronics seem to agree with your views, so maybe you should re-consider them. Apple has been one of the most successful brands of the past few years, and that is not going to change anytime soon, especially not because of the introduction of the new iPods. They don't take any choice away from consumers (ok, except connecting with Linux) but they do offer a few interesting new features (most notably WiFi and touchscreen), so I think the future is pretty bright for the iPod.
Apple's insistence on dictating behavior on their users has crossed the line from insult to injury. Congratulations, Steve, you just lost a customer.
Let me guess, when I google I find hacks using nspluginviewer?
Yes. That, or you could install a 32-bit FF, it's not like it makes a lot of difference in speed or whatever... But nspluginwrapper works pretty well for an ugly hack.
this move makes Adobe finally release a x86_64 version of Flash
Flash works fine on x86_64, it not working on 64-bit Linux is an urban myth. Seriously, just google for it...
They could probably make better use of the die space of the 4th, 3rd, or even 2nd CPU core by putting things like cache there instead.
The benefits of having extra cache drop off very quickly above certain cache sizes (depending on the addressable RAM the cache is indexing). A lot more is involved with improving level-0/1/2 cache performance than just upping the cache size.
I'd expect greater benefits from moving dedicated (but programmable) VLIW units into the CPU to increase instruction-level parallelism, for example for efficient video encoding/decoding, image and audio processing etc. You could create a very versatile CPU that doesn't need a big GPU or dedicated audio hardware, and still be very usable for both workstation as well as multimedia/video editing tasks.
No, neither of those 2, but good guesses ;-)
Exactly. As a matter of fact I work for a company (not mentioning which, my boss wouldn't appreciate it) that develops software to migrate chips to smaller technologies, detects/fixes design-rule violations, detects/fixes litho hotspots, that kind of stuff. It is used by many well-known names in the IC industry. We've been in business for more than 10 years already, so this hardly sounds as something new.
I wonder how much of the 'energy saved' will be consumed by all those machines they use in the hospital for people who get eye problems from staring at white/grey on black text.
Also, You'd think changing your desktop background to solid black would make more of a difference then just changing google. I spent at most 10 minutes a day with the Google page open. And it's not that there's no other site that uses a white background. How much energy do flashing ads consume btw?
I agree. We must protect the fundamental human right to download music!
The scope of this ruling goes beyond only downloading music, it sets a precedent for other cases where 3rd parties request information on your browsing habits.
Sure, until you get a 1080p a year or two down the road. Just seems kinda shortsighted not to spend the extra $100 and to get a player that is going to support you for much longer.
Well, seeing that I only have it for like 6 months I don't think I'll be replacing it anytime soon. Especially because I sit close enough to my TV to not need (or want) a >=40" screen (my TV is 'only' 32"). For $99 I don't mind to replace it within a few years anyway.
As for the guy who commented that it's not really worth it to hook up a HD-DVD player to a 720p TV: I don't really believe that. If I watch closely I can see the macroblocking and color banding on some DVD movies. My current DVD player is not bad but definitely not great, and it doesn't do upscaling or anything like that. It would surprise me if I wouldn't be able to clearly see the difference with an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movie.
So if you just have a 720p TV (like I do) and don't care about 'HDMI 1.3' (whatever benefit you might get from that) or gold-plated connectors (for *digital* signals??), it's actually at least a half-decent player?
While there are definitely areas in which Java really sucks (specifically: UI programming) I think the 'Java lacks the speed of C' argument is getting really, *really* old. Granted, I would not choose Java for my next-generation DX10 graphics engine, because even in C++ it would *need* to stress top-end hardware to the maximum. But properly written Java code can be almost as efficient as C++ code, and in some cases even faster. A hardware accelerated 3D pipeline would actually fit Java pretty well, and could be plenty fast. Orders of magnitude faster than what's needed to introduce people to 3D programming.
You check some of the advanced XNA applications on the 360. These are coded in C#, which is pretty much comparable to Java in terms of performance (the C# VM is apperently pretty good, so it's probably a little faster). The example applications include a very good looking 'racing game' (XNA racer) which uses complex 3D models and textures and runs at a full 60fps, and it's not even using all three CPU cores of the 360.
Interpreted languages are not much slower than statically compiled languages todat...
Qt is slow as molasses. We just failed the speed requirement for an uni project because Qt will easily eat 100% CPU if you have to log data into a table a few times a second (of course that's the reason we don't care
Well, maybe you just need to learn how to code write efficient Qt code then... Qt is not the fastest UI library on earth, but it is *not* 'slow as molasses'. We use it on hardware ranging from Pentium-II@500Mhz, to UltraSparcII@400Mhz to dual Opterons, and even on the lowest-end hardware it works fine.
Why, by the way, would you want to log data into a Qt table a few times a second? Do you seriously expect people to 'read the table' *a few times a second*. Don't you think data aggregation and lazy posting to the table would be a better idea for *any* GUI toolkit. You just sound like blame your own incompetence in GUI programming on Qt.
Yes, but with no HDD or memory unit, I hope you don't mind playing through all of Forza 2 in a single shot.
A memory unit is only $30 IIRC...
IMHO, that's not a valid comparison. Newspapers contain dense texts in which each row is fully occupied. Most programming languages contain maybe 60% whitespace and only 40% characters. Also, when 'reading' code to find what I'm looking for, I look more to indentation to deduce the structure of the code than to the text itself.
Imagine code like this:
Would this code *really* be 'more readable' (in terms of how much effort you brains need to decipher its structure) if it where written like this?:
It's very nice and refreshing to wake up on a saterday morning, read Slashdot, and find out American politicians with a sane view on reality actually still exist. Completely independent of the fact if you like and/or approve of online gambling, softdrugs, alcohol, etc. this is the only way to reduce their harmful effects to a minimum, regulate them, and still respect the choices made by individuals.
I don't know much about Ben Frank's other political views, but he definitely seems more pragmatic (as opposed to dogmatic) than most high-profile US politicians I know of. I think that's a good thing. Where I come from (the Netherlands), the attitude against for example softdrugs, smart drugs, alcohol and other possibly harmful things people can do to themselves is comparable, and from 27 years of experience I can tell this has lead to lower softdrugs usage than in the countries surrounding us, less health issues, less drugs-related crimes etc.
Funny thing is, the Dutch government still has a really stupid and dualistic stance on (online) gambling. Online gambling is specifically prohibited here, as is organising (for example) small-scale poker tournaments etc. The *only* institution that is allowed to offer legal gambling opportunities is 'Holland Casino', which is a government-controlled (but still commercially exploited) casino that has a monopoly on all things related to gambling. This includes, for example, all variants of poker, even though the most popular variants don't even qualify as gambling. Now, over the last few years, playing poker has become a real hype here. Lots of people play it now, and they want to play tournaments against different opponents. What's happening right now, is that small-scale 'illegal' poker tournaments (with buy-ins in the $10-$50 range, or $0.5-$2 cash games) get busted every now and then, and the people entering and organising them are criminalised. This has lead to more people finding their ways to 'Holland Casino' for playing poker, which only offers tournaments starting at $100 buy-ins, or $5-$10 cash games. Just yesterday a study was published that showed a lot of dutch students have gambling debts from playing poker on limits that are way too high for their skills...
What happens when the hypothesis cannot be proved wrong? Not because the tests validate it but because there is no such way to test it for accuracy? And there are some of those being thrown out as fact today.
What happens then, is that people start calling their beliefs 'faith', and eventually these beliefs might even become 'religion'. It's exactly how we ended up with several (all considered equally 'valid' by different groups of people) of "God's word", and the non-falsifiable existence (or non-existence) of God.
In science, no theory or hypothesis is unfalsifiable. Strange enough religion-zealots actually turn this argument around when it comes to their faith, completely blinded of the irony in it.
I was not talking about Boost, that's a completely different subject (on which I mostly disagree with you as well but lets forget about that). I've read most of your replies in this topic, and that's what I'm basing my judgement on. You cannot seriously believe that things like operator overloading, design patterns, RAII, Boost, templates and the other things you see no purpose for are all 'flavour of the month paradigms' and only useful for programmers to show off. If you do, you are not an experienced developer to me, at least not one that moved along with advancements in the field. But maybe you're just trolling by blowing your arguments completely out of proportion.
If you really consider yourself a skilled C++ programmer you'd acknowledge that C++ provides 1001 ways to do the same thing. For some purposes using operator overloading and templates is better, for other purposes using method overloading and OO inheritance is better. Same goes for other problems C++ offers multiple solutions for. Sometimes multiple inheritance is ok, sometimes it is terrible. Heck, sometimes using 'goto' even makes sense. If you're not only consider yourself a skilled C++ programmer but also a skilled software engineer, you'd also acknowledge that code re-use and design patterns are almost always good things if applied properly, irrespective of the implementation language. If you say 'design patterns' is just new and cool terminology for clueless programmers you probably never even opened the de-facto standard work about design patterns (Gamma et. al) and browsed it a little. It's just common solutions to recurring problems, that can save you a lot of work because you don't have to re-invent them yourself. It's just design re-use on the architectural level, which is even more important than re-use on the implementation level.
I think you should try coding up some Java, C#, D or Python some day. You'll probably be disgusted by all the 'paradigms of the month' they applied to those languages, how much re-use and design patterns are incorporated into them etc. You think it's just because the people who created the languages wanted to show off?
No , something like vectorAdd(v1,v2) would be a lot more readable and a damn site easier to grep for. Idiot.
Calling people an idiot does not contribute to making your point. While there actually are some valid points why operator overloading is not always (maybe even most of the times) a good idea, there are also lots of cases where it *is*. You're taking your argument way out of context, which gives me the impression you're not a professional and/or experienced C++ coder (yet?). There is no silver bullet especially not in C++, seeing in how many domains it can be used. Depending on what you're writing, sometimes abstraction from the implementation and improving readability of the logic the code is implementing is much more important than improving traceability of operators etc. Imagine writing a library that has classes to represent polynomials, with methods to add, multiply, evaluate, simplify, etc. polynomials, or individual terms of them. I don't even want to know what even moderately complex code would end up like, if every operation on every different type of polynomial term has its own distinctive member function, instead of the operators also used in real mathematics. Now try asking a mathematician to debug the mathematics (ie: not the code itself) of an application you wrote using this library...
[i]A few years ago I also tried out Insure++ from Parasoft, which seemed to be of similar, if not slightly better, quality.[/i]
We 'use' Insure++ as well, but unfortunately 'using it' is limited to tracking down arcane, semi-valid C++ constructs in our code that Insure++ b0rks on. Insure++ supposed to be a pretty advanced tool, but it is not actively maintained anymore and it's full of limitations that make it almost unusable for existing codebases. Especially stuff with templates, stuff using classes from external namespaces and dodgy C++ constructs that compile without warnings on every compiler I know will make Insure++ instrumentation fail. Also, linking the instrumented source files together fails on 1 out of every 10 object files, especially if they also link against third-party static libs (.a on linux). Sometimes you can fix this, but most of the time it is completely unclear why the thing fails. This effectively rendere the whole tool useless as you cannot be sure there will be no problems left in the non-instrumented parts of your codebase. And in those cases instrumentation *does* work, the output you'll get when running the instrumented binaries is sometimes really unclear, confusing or downright nonsense.
Last but not least, Parasoft support is awful. We've been told some of our linkage problems, for which we filed bug reports, would be fixed in a later release. No new version was released for 1.5 years, and on multiple inquiries about this we did not even get a reply. Then, all of a sudden Parasoft released a new version a while ago, which we found out about 4 months later as they did not bother to notify us about it...
If what you call 'personal freedom' is so aptly represented by the right to bear firearms, I'd say you have a really strange idea of 'freedom'. IMO the most important representatives of personal freedom are freedom of speech, freedom of thought, political preferences, sexual preferences, the right to decide what you do with your own property, the right to proper health care and education, even for the less wealthy, etc. etc. etc. Guns of all things *don't even occur to me* when thinking of personal freedom...
Still, the USA are famous for their bad public health care for large groups of people, their hypocritcal views on sexuality and different sexual preferences, strong commercial lobbies that dictate politics instead of common sense, government censorship, irrational soft drugs (why is smoking a joint not'personal freedom') and alcohol policy and so on. Yet the *one* thing that virtually no 'free people' from other parts of the world (the right to have guns) care about, seems to be the only fucking thing that matters when it comes down to 'freedom'.
You just enjoy your guns... err.. freedom...
Clearly, the "problem" is that we, the Linux community, should be trying to "convert" the n00bs out there who don't know what apt-get is. Having WINE preinstalled would help them get over the fact that they're not running Windows, yet everything is fine, and they can do pretty much everything today they that they could when they were running Windows yesterday.
If you ever tried running anything half-decent with Wine, you would know that it is not exactly a 'n00b-friendly' piece of software anyway. If you even get your application to work at all, it will likely crash frequently, miss features, show display errors, save stuff in crazy locations, look horrible because of font issues etc. etc. Removing Wine does not really make the OS less attrictive for new users, if you ask me. If you wanted to make it more convenient for new Linux users to run Windows apps, including a desktop link to www.parallels.com would probably have better value than including Wine.
I live in the EU and I totally agree with all of that. +1 if I had mod points...
To the GP, I would suggest that you haven't had a large corporation to support. We support a nation wide network (ok, so it's australia, we're still a nation!) with only 13 support staff including our in-house development team.
I don't work in IT support, so you're right about me not having had to support a nation-wide network. I did, however, work as an IT Engineer for a very large multinational (Philips). Although this might not be true for all Philips' divisions or countries, the IT and network over there was maintained completely different from the way you do it. No-one has administrator right, no-one can do even as much as change the display resolution, install custom crap that goes outside the user folders etc. People *could* install software themselves, but only through an automated & fenced-off application that let you pick the tool you needed and then installed it without any user interaction. The actual version, install location (local or network), default settings etc. etc. were all set by IT support.
This approach worked very well. In the time I worked there I never had any problems with my system or the software on it, and none of my colleages ever really had. The systems where all clean and uniform, which IMHO is the way to go. Customizing your workstation is something you should do at home...
Actually its a very effective method for both the IT team and the people who desperately need the administrative access. IT aren't required to understand every little john doe program that these people can want to install so they don't have to support them (this is very clearly communicated to these users).
[..]
An example of a good operator: there's a bloke over in administration who I would swear used to work in IT. He's got Open Office installed when everyone else uses Microsoft Office, he uses firefox, thunderbird and trillian for his messenger. About 500 theme packs and a few other bits of software. According to our helpdesk logging system he has only ever called once, and this was when he patched himself for the new daylight savings time last year. Everyone else had the problem as well.
I'd say that's a pretty stupid way to 'administer' your workstations... Why can these people even install all this shit themselves? How can some bloke in administration 'patch his machine' himself? And how does making them not call support because they know they won't fix your problem help with the maintenance of your network. The only thing I can see something like that heading to is an IT support department that only answers the utterly stupid requests and hardware failures. Employees just don't bother to call them because they don't want there machine re-imaged, so they just start fooling around themselves, or ask some guy like the 'bloke from administration' to 'fix' their system. Eventually that can only and in a maintenance and security nightmare.
If they really add DivX & xvid codecs that'd be very nice indeed. I'll most probably make some use of this if it allows playback from a USB drive, at least for now as I don't have a better alternative. *But*: as a media center/media center extender I think the 360 is pretty much dead in the water, because it has 2 major disadvantages that the first generation Apple TV (with all its own annoying limitations) doesn't have: it makes too much noise for a media player, and it doesn't have wireless built-in by default.
Sure, you can get used to the fan noise, just ignore it, or just turn up the volume to masquerade it. But that doesn't cut it for me. As much as I like my modded Xbox classic with XBMC, I rarely use it for watching movies for the same reason. It kind of kills the atmosphere in quiet scenes, and IMHO a media player just should be silent, period. As for the wireless: you can buy the add-on but I refuse to pay 100 euros for something that should not cost more than 30, and should be in by default.
So I guess I'll just keep looking around for some other affordable HTPC-like solution that can do all this silently. Maybe when the Apple TV is fully hacked to run Linux with full HW support and the XBMC porting efforts yield something I will pick up one of these.